Colin Campbell

You can choose whether you want to vote in the Democratic primary or the Republican primary.

And a lot of people seem to be choosing the Democratic primary, which would seem to be an indication that people are just really eager to vote, particularly on the Democratic side this year, even if the voting they're doing right now is not deciding any sort of partisan contest.

Yeah, we had a pretty big Border Patrol and ICE enforcement for about a week or so last fall in Charlotte.

Some of those agents came up here to the Raleigh-Durham area yesterday.

There was a point where a lot of immigrant-related businesses shut down.

Some construction sites were shut down for a few days during that happening.

So certainly that issue is top of mind here for a lot of voters, particularly those in the middle who may not like what they've seen from immigration enforcement actions so far, even if they'd like to see stronger border protections and a better immigration enforcement system.

I think that's going to be really the challenge for Whatley is to what extent he can separate himself from Trump when he's been with the president on just about every single issue that matters to voters at this point.

What will be interesting to see is I think the Whatley campaign is hoping that they can change the messaging around, that they can focus more on the economy in hopes that the economy does better as we get closer and closer to November.

And I think they're also going to try to go on the attack with the amount of ad spending that's going into this race, trying to paint –

Roy Cooper is soft on crime.

And Whatley's campaign is trying to tie that criminal history to policies by Governor Cooper when he was governor, making the claim essentially that this guy was out of jail because of actions the governor has taken.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that we've seen so far that directly connects the dots on that.

But certainly we're going to see that incident come up again and again in this race.

All right.

We can leave it there for now.

More in just a moment.

So this is one of those primaries that's really going to tell us something about the direction of the Democratic Party's electorate in this state, particularly in a deep blue urban district like this one that's centered around Durham and Chapel Hill.

The incumbent congresswoman there is Valerie Foushee, longtime sort of establishment figure in Democratic politics.

She's seeking a third term, but her opponent is a Durham County commissioner by the name of Nita Alam who ran against Foushee a couple years ago, the first time she ran against